Re: [Caml-list] Executable size?

[John J Lee <jjl@pobox.com>]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, Dustin Sallings wrote:
[...]
> > If you're distributing executables over the internet to people who use
> > modems (ie., most people ;-), download size is important.
>
> -rwx------  1 dustin  staff  42425 12 Nov 10:55 a.out.gz*

That's interesting, and I admit I'd forgotten about compression, but if
you add standard code to make it a self-extracting archive, you might lose
all of the benefit of compression for really small programs (libz.so is
around 60k on my machine, dunno about standard Windows self-extracting
stuff).  But 100k isn't too bad, so it looks like this isn't a significant
problem for O'Caml, for most cases.

[...]
> 	I wasn't aware you could distribute python exes.  That was my point.

py2exe and McMillan Installer.  I think py2exe actually requires a few
DLLs with the .exe, but Installer can generate single .exes (and supports
platforms other than Windows).  The smallest "hello world" I've seen is
459k, though (that was with some unpublished .exe-creation software).


> 	I have to say I'm really surprised by such a strong emphasis on
> executable size.  I've been learning various programming languages
> specifically because I want to create more reliable applications with
> reasonable performance with less effort (both initially and throughout
> the lifetime of the application).

Most of the time, I don't care about it at all -- would I be using Python
if it were otherwise??  But executable size is the only strong push on me
to use anything other than Python (there's the pull of functional
languages, yes, but that's definitely a pull, not a push :-).


John

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